Descend into mad­ness with a new ani­mat­ed short from David Lynch

For the past month, David Lynch​’s YouTube chan­nel has been the province of self-record­ed clips in which the not­ed film­mak­er and artist deliv­ers dai­ly fore­casts for weath­er in the Los Ange­les area. A gift to the most hard­core fans, it didn’t give those invest­ed in the man’s cin­e­mat­ic out­put a whole lot to pore over, but now a new video has appeared in the so-called David Lynch The­ater as a more deci­sive cre­ative statement.

Lynch has final­ly giv­en the world a look at Fire (Pozar), an ani­mat­ed short and col­lab­o­ra­tion with Pol­ish-Amer­i­can com­pos­er Marek Zebrows­ki that’s been a long time com­ing. Dur­ing a talk at the USC School of Music in 2015, Lynch made men­tion of a fol­low-up to his 2007 album with Zebrows­ki, artic­u­lat­ing an inten­tion to give the musi­cian free license to inter­pret a set of giv­en visu­als how­ev­er he might please.

The result of this exper­i­ment has now been made avail­able, a dis­turb­ing syn­the­sis of sound and image joined by a taste for the eerie. Lynch gets back in the sad­dle of ani­ma­tion, return­ing to the crude sur­re­al­is­tic style of his ear­ly avant-garde short Six Men Get­ting Sick (Six Times). In stark black-and-white, he priv­i­leges irreg­u­lar lines and move­ments sug­gest­ing the work of a human hand, mak­ing the non­hu­man ele­ments (antlered mon­strosi­ties, a float­ing worm that wrig­gles out of the sun) even more uncanny.

It’s all accom­pa­nied by moan­ing strings from the Pen­derec­ki Quar­tet, Zebrowski’s kin­dreds in the Pol­ish music world. They take the prin­ci­ple of trans­la­tion from image to noise and run with it, cre­at­ing an equiv­a­lent for Lynch’s on-the-move pointil­lism with the pizzi­ca­to plucks going along with it. As the prosce­ni­um arch that frames the begin­ning of the short would sug­gest, it’s more of a mixed-media art project than a prop­er film.

Lynch has grown increas­ing­ly gen­er­ous with the long-lan­guish­ing bits of his cat­a­logue as of late; ​“Fire” arrives hot on the heels of What Did Jack Do?, anoth­er short unseen for years until the direc­tor loosed it on the Inter­net with no warn­ing. It’s a nice stop­gap solu­tion while we’re all focused on sur­viv­ing the lock­down, but true dis­ci­ples still await the holy grail that may nev­er come: a new feature.